You live your life. You die. You awake on
the sandless bank of a mile-wide river. You are naked, bald and your body
is that of a healthy 25 year old. You have only a lidded, indestructible
metal bucket with a deceptively light weight attached to your wrist by a
translucent strap. There are thousands of people around you, all in the
same state of confusion. Towering over the grassy, wooded valley is a
sheer, black-rocked mountain range. The only structure is a very large,
mushroom-shaped table of black stone, positioned at the edge of the river.
Every morning, afternoon and evening, an electrical, blue flame roars from the
top. You and your fellows soon realize that if a bucket is on the stone
when it fires, it will be filled with delicious, perfectly prepared food and
various other amenities, like tobacco and marijuana. You will never get
sick, you will never age, and no child will ever be born to a woman. You
are a resurrectee on Resurrection Day, when every human who has ever lived and
died until 1983 has been reborn on the many million-mile banks of the Great
River. Even if you are to die on this planet, you will be resurrected
again at a random, distant location on another bank. Welcome to the
afterlife.

The Riverworld series of novels by the great Philip
Jose Farmer began with To Your Scattered Bodies Go, first published in
1971. The five books in the series track the progress of Sir Richard
Francis Burton and his fellow resurrectees in their quest to find out who is
responsible for this mass rebirth, and deign their nefarious plans for
humanity. The entire listing of books in the central five-volume cycle:

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

The Fabulous Riverboat

The Dark Design

The Magic Labyrinth

The Gods of Riverworld

Who
is Philip Jose Farmer?

Not only has Farmer been responsible for the Riverworld
series, but he is perhaps best known for his World of Tiers cycle. He
fascination for history and the characters who make it led him to explore his
boyhood heroes in a universe of his unique creation. An excellent site
with all the info on Farmer you could want isThe
Unofficial Philip Jose Farmer Homepage.